At the start of the Iraq invasion in 2003 the Pentagon bought exclusive rights to commercial satellite imagery of Afghanistan and Pakistan. These space images are astonishingly high-resolution, showing objects as small as one meter, and are used to keep tabs on everything from military activity to oil well fires, volcanoes and global warming. The surprising thing about the US government's action was not that they sought to control space photographs of operational areas but they way they did it through commercial media rights, behaving more like a newscaster with an exclusive than a government with a war on its hands. If there is one overall message in this book it is probably that: digitization means that we -- at least we in the West -- are all in the media business now.

Just think what it used to mean to be a Star Trek fan: you would watch the program and perhaps buy some spin-off products. Now you can blog about it, playact your favorite character in an online world and even make and distribute your own films like the people at http://www.hiddenfrontier.com. Or consider 'mash-ups', hybrids of different data sources that create whole new sets of meanings and uses like http://chicago.everyblock.com/crime which gets maps and crime stats to work together. And in case you thought this was just about the young, the average age of the American computer gamer is 33, and one-quarter are 50 or older.

Pavlik's book will leave you in little doubt that digitization is transforming every aspect of the media, but its real achievement is to bring some order and structure to what could otherwise be a mere catalogue. Pavlik identifies twelve separate dimensions of digital transformation: delivery medium, access devices, audiences and users, producers, content, distributors, finance and business, regulation and law, production, invention, ethics and children. Each of the twelve receives separate treatment in its own chapter. Few writers would be able to cover such a broad sweep of material but Pavlik, Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers, is perhaps one of the few who can do so convincingly, seemingly as much at home discussing the latest generation of handheld devices as deliberating the ethics of VNRs (video news releases -- essentially advertising in the guise of news).

This is not a book with a thesis but it is perhaps a book with a hundred theses, and certainly a book that might help to get a hundred media theses going. Out of all the detail some big themes do take shape: the fragmentation of audiences; the globalization of markets; the emergence of the user-producer; the convergence, miniaturization and mobility of devices to name just the most obvious. None of these is in itself a new idea but this is perhaps the first time that they have been so systematically and comprehensively surveyed.

Encyclopedias -- which is what this book really is -- do of course live by slightly different standards from other books. They don't have to be page turners from end to end, and reasonable people will tolerate some repetition and overlapping between sections. In return we expect them to be orderly, structured, comprehensive and balanced. In many ways Media in the Digital Age does live up to these demands but it must be said that the book is overwhelmingly focused on the US, with very little discussion of the British or European media environment, let alone the rest of the world. The division into twelve domains, while a real analytical contribution, makes it difficult to develop coherent overall themes and arguments, and in a work so broad ranging it is inevitable that some topics receive superficial or disjointed treatment -- the digital divide is a case in point. Theory too gets short shrift: Baudrillard, Habermas and others get the occasional mention but it feels more like going through the motions than an integral part of the project.

There are however many books about theory, far fewer rigorous studies of contemporary trends. None of the criticisms detracts from the book's great strength in providing encyclopedic coverage of the forms and practices evolving so rapidly in the digital media. For anyone interested in any of Pavlik's twelve domains this book is probably the closest thing around to a satellite view of that fast-changing landscape.

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